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Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

businessinsider.com

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Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#251

Post by eyezick »

mthoms wrote: post #184
gamblor956 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with the article. The March Report merely says they were able to recover the cold storage wallets and discovered they were empty; it doesn't go into how they got access to those wallets since that isn't relevant to the report. Per the company and prior news reporting, those cold storage wallets discussed in the March Report were only stored on the owner's laptop, which was previously inaccessibl…

>The fact that they were able to access those wallets means they "cracked" the security measures on that laptop Incorrect. Experts were able to trace funds back to the cold storage wallets addresses using analysis. But the private keys have not been located and no, the laptop has not been "cracked".

Yup: "The Monitor has commenced a preliminary review of the transactional activity of the Identified Bitcoin Cold Wallets utilizing public blockchain records. This analysis..."

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#252

Post by vermilingua »

gumby wrote: post #117
tim333 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the widow is left with just the 17 properties, 2 cars, yacht and plane that he earned through honest hard work. Another thing you could work into the plot is $9m appears to be with WB21 "Banking Redefined" which claimed a million users but was discovered to only have 135 downloads of its app (now removed), is run by a convicted fraudster and was awarded "Global Banker Award 2018" in a black tie ceremony that they…

Or perhaps “widow”

Perhaps seems pretty accurate yes

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#253

Post by jacquesm »

vkou wrote: post #38
jacquesm wrote: post #27

I think it might pay off to spread the mugshot of this character far and wide. There is a non zero chance that he's not dead at all.

Yes, to make it easier for vigilante justice to find, and kill someone some unlucky sap who looks like Gerald.

I think you're jumping to conclusions a bit.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#254

Post by ljm »

taude wrote: post #188
pratnala wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cosmos db is where it is at

I can't believe y'all aren't taking advantage of using MongoDB's data loss feature as an opportunity here in true HN taste.

Chekhov’s Database: if a No-SQL DB is referred to in passing, it is inevitable that it will fail to persist at the most inconvenient time.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#255

Post by ljm »

justinclift wrote: post #241
uberman wrote: post #3

For some reason this sounds like the plot of a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. CEO of Crypto Company... 1) Takes time off to build orphanage in region noted for fake deaths. 2) Subsequently dies unexpectedly. 3) Is immediately cremated. 4) Wife waits a month before saying "oh by the way he is dead" 5) Wife claims all keys on encrypted laptop 6) World watches as wallets mysteriously empty 7) Experts crack laptop 8)…

Plot twist: 10) The CEO was really an actor... hired by the "wife", who masterminded the whole thing Alternative plot twist: 10b) Both the CEO and wife are hired actors. The head of the orphanage was the mastermind

SCP Twist: the orphanage itself was the mastermind; it manifests when a blockchain fintech startup launches and exists solely to de-materialise the founders and redistribute crypto funds. The children of the orphanage are yet to be identified, though it is speculated that they are the disappeared fintech founders.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#256

Post by rocqua »

HenryBemis wrote: post #125
LeonM wrote: post #48

My take on this is that they probably were insolvent for a long time already due to previous hacks/theft. The CEO just decided to lie about the supposedly 137M in funds 'safely' stored on his laptop. This is also what happened at MtGox, except that at MtGox they 'lost' wel over a million BTC. Edit: relevant listening: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/9/

And this is the problem. These guys are not regulated. There is no transparency. There are no external auditors. There is no control. When we find out, it is always too late. Every "cryptocurrency bank" is a potential Enron. I fear both the involvement of Central Banks and at the same time the lack of it. If EY (or anyone else serious about this) 'follows the money' then that would be a very interesting report to rea…

There are decent ways for exchanges to prove they are solvent without revealing details [1]. It's just that very few of them take the effort to set up the system. If you want decent privacy, it also depends on creditors checking their credit was properly committed.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1008.pdf

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#257

Post by short_sells_poo »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #148
dtx1 wrote: post #5

How did they crack the Laptop? Just Bruteforcing a bad password or 0Day-ing the Encryption?

I don’t know about now, but in the past accessing an account was as easy as resetting the password in safe mode. I have done this numerous times when I worked in IT for people who forgot their passwords. It was such a stupid simple workaround. It wouldn’t surprise me if such workarounds still exist in win 10 and previous.

The thing is, if you enable hard drive encryption (BitLocker in Windows?), resetting the password means that you lose access to the encrypted bits.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#258

Post by easymodex »

blibble wrote: post #170
icebraining wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering 2008, what's the point of those lessons? Might as well save a few tax dollars on "regulators".

how many depositors lost money in the financial crisis?

Probably an order of magnitude more than whole crypto-sphere combined. People just think if they didn't lose anything it wasn't that bad.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#259

Post by dmitriid »

fixermark wrote: post #217
Amelorate wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting. All these are cryptocurrencies. You need to have more than that. I own 30,000 different kinds of assets. Stocks, bonds, crypto, I even own all of the funds. You're suffering from way too much centralization.

Are y'all still keeping all your assets on only one planet? Wow, that's risky.

-- skipping a few steps --

Confined to only three dimensions? Pfft.

Re: Experts cracked laptop of crypto CEO who died with $137M, but the money was gone

#260

Post by poooogles »

blibble wrote: post #170
icebraining wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering 2008, what's the point of those lessons? Might as well save a few tax dollars on "regulators".

how many depositors lost money in the financial crisis?

In the UK and Netherlands plenty due to icesave AFAIK [1]. I'm not sure if deposits over the protected amount were ever paid back.

//edit - looks like they were by the UK and NL governments.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icesave_dispute

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